In recent time, social networks have pervaded the daily life of many millions of people. Hundreds of social networking and social sharing platforms, including microblogging and similar services, facilitate millions of shared messages on a daily basis. Many users post messages regarding recent purchases, product reviews, or simply to discuss products that hold interest to them. Merchants have attempted to utilize data culled from such messages to supplement traditional marketing and advertising activities and thereby profit from that data.
The challenges of gathering such data from a variety of heterogeneous platforms, aggregating that data, and presenting representations of that data to consumers in a useful format have proved difficult for merchants to overcome.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding components throughout the several views of the drawings. Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present disclosure. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present disclosure.